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Laurent Groll picks up two Doral warehouses for $18M
Miami Beach-based real estate investor paid $188 psf for the buildings
Laurent Groll bought a pair of adjacent industrial buildings in Doral for $18.1 million.
An entity managed by the Miami Beach-based real estate investor acquired two warehouses spanning nearly 93,000 square feet at 8280 Northwest 64th Street and 6350 Northwest 82nd Avenue, records show. Groll’s affiliate obtained a $10.8 million loan from Bank of America.
The deal breaks down to about $188 per square foot for the buildings.
The sellers, two entities managed by William and Charlotte Lyons in Englewood, Fla., bought the two properties in 1996, records show. The previous sale price is not listed in the deed. The buildings were completed in 1983 and 1989.
In July, Groll and his partners, Nelson Gonzalez and Alfredo Xiques, flipped a waterfront Miami Beach lot for $14 million for a 31 percent gain, one month after acquiring the property. The previous month, a Groll entity paid $15 million for an office complex in Miami Lakes, records show.
Groll picked up the Doral warehouses at a time landlords keep jacking up asking rents in South Florida’s industrial market. Warehouse vacancy rates in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties hit record low single digits during the third quarter, according to JLL.
The vacancy rate in Miami-Dade dropped to 1.8 percent in the quarter, compared to 4.5 percent during the same period of last year, JLL found. As a result, asking rents rose to $14.35 a square foot in the third quarter, compared to $8.84 per square foot during the same period of last year.
Demand is so strong in Miami-Dade that developers are running out of land to build new industrial projects. Earlier this week, the Miami-Dade County Commission voted 8-4 to allow developers Stephen Blumenthal and Jose Hevia to build a massive industrial development on 379 acres in southwest Miami-Dade that is outside the urban development boundary, or UDB.
The boundary is meant to limit the encroachment of new developments on farmland, wetlands, the Everglades and Biscayne Bay. The developers promised to donate 611 acres of land to Miami-Dade’s Environmentally Endangered Lands Program to win county commission approval.